The Children's Book - A. S. Byatt [200]
But now, Violet seemed, and felt, different. She moved around Dorothy’s hem on hands and knees, her mouth pressed tight over bristling pins, her thin hands tugging at Dorothy’s skirt, or tweaking and clasping her waist. Dorothy looked down into Violet’s tightly drawn scalp and the knob of her dark hair on her narrow neck. It was true, her body was more like Dorothy’s was going to be, than was Olive’s maternal amplitude. Dorothy, who was going to be a doctor, who had to keep telling herself she was going to be a doctor, since everyone was paying half-attention, at best, to this fact, had made it her business to inform herself thoroughly about how babies were born. She had cut open dead pregnant rats, full of tiny, pink, blind, beanlike sleepers. She had looked at a midwifery textbook, with a fat, full-term baby curled in a diagrammatic womb, the crown of its head in the pelvic cavity, the umbilical cord floating and twining in the fluid. She had stopped short of imagining either such a creature inside herself, or herself blindly waiting to be ejected from Olive, down there. But now, as Violet fussed over her, and admired her, she involuntarily had a vision of a Dorothy-puppet—snug or stifled, which?—inside Violet’s lean stomach. She did not feel a flow of filial warmth. She felt repelled. She stood in her midnight silk, in its stiff rustle, and wondered what had happened to the baby Hedda had been so sure was on the way. Violet was as flat as a board. As she always had been. It would be nice if Hedda was lying, or had deceived herself, but Dorothy did not think so. Hedda believed what she said, and what she said was convincing. Either Violet had been wrong about her condition, or she had been trying to upset Humphry, or she had done something to get rid of this unwanted brother or sister. That seemed the most likely. And yet here she was, her mouth full of pins, skinny and sexless, making “mmn” noises of satisfaction over Dorothy’s waist, over the bodices that gave her, for the first time, pushed up and into shape, a pretty little bust.
She ought to feel kind to Violet, indeed, indignant on her behalf. She did not. She was embarrassed and irritated to the depth of her soul.
Violet said “You’re growing into a good-looking young lady after all, my love. You were scraggy as a little ’un but you are going to blossom after all. You must put your hair up, and I’ll make you some silk flowers to put in it. Or maybe moons and stars on some frothy bits of illusion. To go with the sky. How do you feel?”
“Whatever you think.”
“ I think you are going to be the belle of the ball. You must stand up straight and not slouch. You’ll surprise them all.”
The note was—possessive? Fierce beyond what was needed? “What are you going to wear, yourself?”
“Am I invited? I think I may not be. It is a supper dance for young things. I’m not the mother, even if I do a lot of the mothering.”
The obvious irony hurt Dorothy, who did not know what to think or say.
Dorothy had no one to talk to about what Hedda had said, or about what she felt about it. Tom had closed it out as though it had never happened. Phyllis was “too young”—younger sisters are always too young to be talked to. She had not discussed this matter with Griselda, with whom she discussed almost everything. She felt that anything she said, any speculation she voiced, even to Griselda, would immediately become hard fact, out in the world. And then she might need to do something, or at least begin to be something she hadn’t known she was.
On the day of the supper dance, which the Wellwoods called the Ball, Prosper Cain persuaded the Museum, which